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Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

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Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#241

Post by sudosysgen »

woodruffw wrote: post #199
rdtsc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overwhelming evidence (including the recovered fuselage) that nothing collided with the aircraft. Anti-aircraft missiles don’t necessarily collide with the target. They can spray sharpnel/fragments at the target. Only a few of those in the fuel tank or engine would be necessarily. So unless they recovered all the fuselage parts, it might be hard to discount the missile as the cause. Wonder if anyone who confiscated…

I believe over 95% of the airframe has been recovered at this point, with no evidence of an external explosion or collision. I suppose the evidence could be solely present on the 5% that wasn’t recovered, but that requires a significant speculative leap.

The SM-2 has direct-hit capability. If it did directly hit the fuselage without the NTSB being briefed on its capabilities, it could easily be mistaken.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#242

Post by WalterBright »

wbl wrote: post #144
WalterBright wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A missile with a dummy warhead could easily bring it down without exploding. Just hit it where structural failure would result. What you'd want to look for is an appropriately sized hole, and residue from the missile's exhaust. The reason for the warhead is to improve the odds of the bringing down the airplane.

No it could not unless it impacted at exactly the wrong place. Downing planes with missiles is hard: much of a plane can survive having a hole in it, while there are a few critical sections. A AIM-9 crashed into a MIG, didn't go off, got stuck, and reverse engineered after landing.

A 747 has plenty of wrong places that if hit would be curtains. It is not designed to resist battle damage. It is designed to resist failure of individual components.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#243

Post by ceejayoz »

sudosysgen wrote: post #236
ceejayoz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how many have seen a mid-air explosion of a 747 to compare against ? "It looked like a missile" may be entirely true. It may also be true that a burning, rapidly climbing half of a 747 looks a bit like a missile from afar. Re: edit: > Missiles are far faster Speed is notoriously hard to measure visually. Watch a A380 come in for a landing and you'll swear it's barely moving. > are on fire from the ground up…

> Most of the eyewitnesses were over the horizon from any potential launch site. Yes, you will still see it ascend over the horizon. Not so for a level plane. >A tail-heavy half of a 747 could absolutely go vertical for a bit with the entire nose missing. No, it can't. In the unlikely event that it can keep from stalling, a positive feedback loop from being aerodynamically unstable would send it in a spin. It wouldn'…

> Yes, you will still see it ascend over the horizon.

You notice something out to sea. It's a lit object rising up into the air. There's then an explosion. This describes both "missile hits plane" and "burning plane flying upwards explodes".

> No, it can't.

I mean, tell that to the NTSB, who didn't have much objection to the CIA's theory. Or the world's community of aviation engineers, who a) weren't part of the conspiracy and b) didn't riot over something you're claiming is obviously impossible.

Essentially, it did this, but at a much higher starting speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUWC2jfjqI

> In the unlikely event that it can keep from stalling...

Yes, it would stall. If you want to stall a plane, one of the easiest ways ways is to pitch up sharply.

> It wouldn't be able to pitch up for more than a few seconds before spinning wildly or disintegrating from aerodynamic forces.

Yes, that's the ka-boom part of what was seen. There's an animation based on the reconstruction at https://imgur.com/a/zin7CRo that demonstrates this, exactly as you describe - pitch up, flip over, disintegrate.

> Sonic booms sound just like explosions.

Then we agree that "people said it sounded like a missile" is not meaningful.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#244

Post by waynecochran »

ceejayoz wrote: post #240
waynecochran wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if a shot a gun down the street intending to hit a rabbit and shot my neighbor instead I would be charged with something more than mere negligence.

That'd be a negligent discharge, and if they died, a negligent homicide.

I would think it would be at least reckless homicide. IANAL.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#245

Post by ceejayoz »

avh02 wrote: post #190
ceejayoz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how many have seen a mid-air explosion of a 747 to compare against ? "It looked like a missile" may be entirely true. It may also be true that a burning, rapidly climbing half of a 747 looks a bit like a missile from afar. Re: edit: > Missiles are far faster Speed is notoriously hard to measure visually. Watch a A380 come in for a landing and you'll swear it's barely moving. > are on fire from the ground up…

Of everything you said > A tail-heavy half of a 747 could absolutely go vertical for a bit with the entire nose missing. Is doing some very heavy assuming.

It's not an assumption.

Here's what a tail-heavy 747 does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUWC2jfjqI

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#246

Post by sumofproducts »

sudosysgen wrote: post #241
woodruffw wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe over 95% of the airframe has been recovered at this point, with no evidence of an external explosion or collision. I suppose the evidence could be solely present on the 5% that wasn’t recovered, but that requires a significant speculative leap.

The SM-2 has direct-hit capability. If it did directly hit the fuselage without the NTSB being briefed on its capabilities, it could easily be mistaken.

You're thinking of SM-3, not SM-2, and SM-3's minimum altitude is somewhere in the rarefied upper atmosphere when it burns out and can separate the kill vehicle. Not even the abortive SM-2 Block IV was hit-to-kill.

That said, all SAMs without nose proxy fuzing are /theoretically/ capable of directly impacting their targets. Only a scant handful of ABM-specialized interceptors are designed to do so in order to ensure either complete warhead destruction OR a miss that doesn't produce a boatload of shredded debris clutter.

A direct hit would shred a huge amount of of the airplane, the expanding cloud of non-warhead missile bits would blow a hole through the other side, and the entire thing would be LITTERED with shrapnel.

A marginal intercept is unlikely; you'd need the missile itself to fail in some way; airliners are, unfortunately, effortless targets. Even then, it would have to miss by an absolutely humongous distance (probably larger than a proxy fuze could measure, so command-detonated by the launching system) to golden BB one single piece of shrapnel into a vital airplane bit.

There are a nigh-infinite number of ways anti-air engagements can go, but virtually none of them result in splashing the target without poking a telltale quantity/distribution/shape of holes in it.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#247

Post by mixmastamyk »

sonotathrowaway wrote: post #173
jonnybgood wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also manufactured overwhelming evidence that the Viet Cong attacked a navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Why would you use these examples? These are cases of them being wrong, not manufacturing. Both cases are well-documented. And the Viet Cong did attack, but only once. > They’ll gladly manufacture evidence that leads to the deaths of more t…

No, the CIA was not wrong about Saddam. It knew internally that the regime was not producing weapons, and communicated that clearly to Bush, repeatedly. Bush decided that he could force the CIA to manufacture evidence, so he installed political operatives that forced the CIA author reports relying on a source they knew was lying. The answer to both questions is that you need to accept that an intelligence agency is n…

s/Bush/Cheney/g

s/CIA/DOD/

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#248

Post by thaumasiotes »

naniwaduni wrote: post #223
bitexploder wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expert witnesses always agree with whomever hired them. Just a point to consider.

The real filter is, of course, on being able to hire credible expert witnesses who agree with you.

That is a purely monetary filter. The court is not able to determine which experts are credible and which aren't.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#249

Post by sudosysgen »

sumofproducts wrote: post #246
sudosysgen wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SM-2 has direct-hit capability. If it did directly hit the fuselage without the NTSB being briefed on its capabilities, it could easily be mistaken.

You're thinking of SM-3, not SM-2, and SM-3's minimum altitude is somewhere in the rarefied upper atmosphere when it burns out and can separate the kill vehicle. Not even the abortive SM-2 Block IV was hit-to-kill. That said, all SAMs without nose proxy fuzing are /theoretically/ capable of directly impacting their targets. Only a scant handful of ABM-specialized interceptors are designed to do so in order to ensure…

I'm not. The SM-2 has contact fuze capability in some models. Look it up. This was almost under active development at the time, as the SM-2 Block IV.

I'm not talking about therotically here. The SM-2 was at the time in a development program that involved direct hits.

A test warhead for direct hit capability is something that was tested for the SM-2 repeatedly, and was almost certainly being tested around the time this incident happened.

You would not expect any fragmentation in such test. Since hit to kill capability was under development at the time, and since test missiles often have dummy warhead, you could reasonably expect exactly what I said.

Re: Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

#250

Post by hammock »

ceejayoz wrote: post #164
tremon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an insane idea? How much lift can a pair of wings generate without thrust or stabilization? If the plane broke apart in mid-air, as you say, the engines would have shut down immediately. The only "thrust" the back section had remaining is the inertial energy from its moving mass. Without attitude control and with a huge gaping hole in the front acting as an air brake, I struggle to see how the plane could have cl…

If it were that obvious, cover-up would be impossible. You’d have had hundreds of aeronautical engineers screaming to everyone who’d listen.

Well there were thousands of architects and engineers screaming ideas about 9/11. Doesn’t mean much

https://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/Record/7884068/File/Docume...

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